His name helped get him on the first rung of McLaren’s junior ladder, but Magnussen said that the pressure quickly piled on and he was given no special treatment as he moved up through the series.
At the end of 2012, he had just finished seventh in the Formula Renault 3.5 Series and McLaren issued a blunt ultimatum.
“After my first year [in Formula Renault], I’d had a couple of wins, a couple of pole positions, but it hadn’t been consistent,” said Magnussen.
“So they told me, next year you have to win [the championship], if not, [F1] won’t happen for you. I got halfway through the year and had built up a really good lead. Then [in] the second half of the year, I won every race and took every pole because the pressure just came off. And then yeah, got the seat.”
Magnussen initially thought that McLaren was going to place him at the Force India team but, late in 2013, just before Ron Dennis returned to the team, Sergio Perez was dropped from McLaren and Magnussen announced as his replacement alongside Jenson Button.
“I was thinking that I would go to Force India for some years to develop and learn for McLaren to then take me back if I performed well,” he said.
“Suddenly, Martin Whitmarsh is fired from McLaren and Ron Dennis comes back and things changed, so I got the McLaren drive.”
It started off brilliantly with a podium in Magnussen’s debut race, but that was as good as it was going to get for the Dane.
“It messed up all my expectations,” he said. “It meant they were crazy and wrong because the car we had wasn’t a championship contender.
At the time of writing, it remains Magnussen’s only podium in F1
“I just won a championship and the next logical step in my mind was to go into F1 and fight for wins, pick up where I left.
“That’s not how it worked and once it became clear that the car wasn’t [a] championship contender, I became very frustrated.”
What was labelled as a “dream move” by Magnussen only lasted one season, after McLaren signed Fernando Alonso for 2015 and elected to keep Button.
Only a vacancy at Renault saved Magnussen from leaving F1. After a year there, he joined Haas where he has been ever since, save for a year out in 2021.
